Monday, 20 July 2015

The mountains, it's always the mountains. Check out the change in the General Classification positions throughout the last week stages. The craziness of the graph shows you how much was going on in some epic battles.

Still glad to see Chris Froome and Team Sky doing well with the Welsh wizard (Geraint Thomas) somehow keeping pace with the top climbers in the World.

Sunday, 12 July 2015

So far so good for Team Sky fans after week one of the Tour de France 2015. Chris Froome is leading the way in to the first rest day after one of the most challenging opening weeks of the tour. Cross winds, crashes, 'pave' and two time-trials have trimmed the Tour field down to 185 riders who will carry on in to the Pyranees for week 2.

Two leaders (Cancellara and Martin) have crashed out in very dramatic fashion so as a Brit, I'll be hoping the same fate doesn't happen to the current leader.

When exploring the visualisation, click on the teams or riders to see how they are progressing through the General Classification

I'll be updating the visualisation as one of the toughest sporting events on the planet continues.

Animated
storytelling like Hans Rosling and demographic change is compelling to the
audience – showing grouping / hierarchies is an effective way to communicate
the points (ie showing variation within regions)

Zeigarnik
effect – theory of information only being retained whilst there is no interruption.
Not revealing the answer is a way to make something more memorable – ie a
cliff-hanger

The data
sources are numerous and varied. The plane often transfers the data when on the
ground.

The
co-ordinates for the planes used to have to be manually input but this is now
automated through ACARs

Nik uses
Alteryx to manipulate the data ready for visualisation in Tableau. The analysis
done feeds in to the fuel efficiency overheads as EasyJet (as with all other
airlines) have to carry at least x% of fuel (number not given) as a safety
reserve.

Flight path
accuracy used to be quite poor. It was previously enhanced with Excel. Now the
work is done in Alteryx to make the process less manual and more efficient.

Bird
strikes are shown as a slide of an Angry Bird being fired at an EasyJet plane –
best slide so far this conference.

-The
desired goal is to match bird migration patterns with flight direction so the
planes don’t get hit (and need to be serviced) and birds don’t die.

Lots of the
reporting completed is for the benefit of the regulator as much as the
business. Proving flight safety is very important and mapping the data against
normal performance under stressed conditions (ie one engine only) what would
happen?

1.Big data (Dr Ben’s term not mine) is
used to avoid falling victim to noise

Probability
and distribution is vital when working average

Funnel
plots are useful to demonstrate this pattern

“Everyone
likes to think they are ‘just above’ but only half of us can be above the
median”

Systematic
Reviews (Meta-Analysis) are the best tests (next is randomised control trials) that
you can run all the way through to ‘Ideas, Opinions and Editorials’

-Science
is built on test rather than authority as it should be about clarity and
evidence rather than thought

-PHDs
can be bought – Ben did for his dead cat!

Scientific
studies get blown out of proportion – findings are often laboratory based and
can’t be related to human-world reality

Correlation
and Causation – normally at the heart of the issues of bogus claims

Running
true Randomised Trials is difficult to close off any other factors

-“People
take a really long time to die and that’s really annoying for medical research”

-Can’t
gloss over the issues of your data set – you have to highlight

Randomised
control trial example

-200
people with headaches

-Randomly
split them in to 2

-Half
get the new pill, half get the old pill

oGet
scores to the changes

Mapping
Drug Prescription variance across the UK is very different. In one of the most
advanced countries where medical treatment is near at hand, there should be
little variation as the decisions should be based on data and not opinion of
medical administrators.

The same
information about small chances to improved survival rates are inferred
differently by different people

-Chemotherapy
usage to increase life expectancy a little or prolong life further for example

Dr Ben
argues for providing patients with evidence and information to allow the
patient to make logical choices

-Doctors
are given targets that are driving their behaviour that are directly effecting
their patients

Should be
monitoring the impact of drug assignment on the public by just collecting data
about the outcome that just doesn’t get monitored.

-Shows
full list for filtering (expensive) and three quick filters (all having to be
queried for each stage)

-Relative
date filter or range date filters are faster than date part filters

Using views
for filters improves performance and the use of dashboard actions make life
faster

Adding
parameterised filter to the data source moves it up in the order of operations
making your data source smaller, sooner

Mrunal and
I will disagree about what the better User Experience is between filters and
actions. When labelled well, I personally think dashboard actions make for a
lot better experience and keeps you focused on the dashboard rather than the
tool.

Aggregate
to ‘Visible Dimensions’ is a great data granularity saver. ‘Hide All Unused
Fields’ make the data set thinner.

Orange,
Grey and Blue introduced to get away from Red, Amber and Green

Information
Buttons on dashboards to help Consumers make the most of their data

What is
going to be different for the CEO? Paul’s honest answer was not a lot apart
from speed. Paul highlighted the 4 or 5 chains of command the request goes
through to cobble together the ‘beautified question’.

-“Tangible
changes to the way that our analysts work”

Live Demos

Paul took
us through a full safety briefing before introducing his live demos

Using
Tableau to show the difference between expected journey vs actually flown
(timing and fuel usage)

Using
routes against maps to see how the pilot is making choices to avoid noise
pollution for wealthy areas

Allocated
seating – 3 price rows when introduced

Analyse was
completed on these numbers. Paul and the team used Tableau to show a custom
background image to show where people were sitting on a flight. Different
images used to show the different planes.

People are
prepared to pay to sit as far forward as possible for the least price.

EasyJet board
use their iPads instead of their laptops to consume their dashboards

Paul is
testing deploying dashboards through the Apple Watch to keep decision makers
close to their data / information.

Birdstrikes
are an issue for EasyJet and are therefore monitoring when and where they are
happening to insure the correct maintenance is being done to their aircraft.

Showing the
impact of strikes by French Aircraft control can help the company understand
how to respond to such issues.

Making
discoveries with data is what making working with data so exciting

Neil
DeGrasse-Tyson describes discovery using the metaphors of light – what if we
could look through infra-red or night-vision

-Tolame
in Ancient Egypt sees that stars are moving across the night sky and therefore
assume everything is rotating round the Earth. He was limited by technology
that couldn’t test his theory further.

-17th
Century – two dutch inventory use a convex lens and concave lens in the same
tube. They just invented the Telescope

-Later
in that century – Galileo turns the telescope to the night’s sky. Technology
helps the findings and discoveries grow even further

-1920s
– US Prohibition kicks in – Hubble discovers stars are spread across the
universe. Hubble had the same data set (the night’s sky) but he had the
technology to support his discoveries to see the infinite (discuss!!) expanse

Web
Connector to Google Sheets, Facebook stats etc opens up a whole load of
possibilities for new visualisation and analysis. Allows Tableau to link in to
Quandl too (Francois showing off Craig’s Quandl connector)

Analytics

-Median
with 95% Confidence Interval (listening to customer feedback)

-Calculation
Editor now in Filter dialogue box

-Allowing
the map to stop paning/zooming

-Radial
map selector – now showing meters / miles on the radial

Mobile

-Offline
sync allows you to explore your data on the move

-Your
favourites will be offline sync’d by manual log-in but auto-updates coming in
later versions

-App
is a compliment to the server but the new features will only work with v9.0 or
v9.1